Sassoon Infant

The Sassoon Primary project started as research with children, asking them what features of letters and spacing they liked best and what was easiest for them to read. The findings are reported in Computers and Typography (Sassoon 1993) published by Intellect. Overall, mainstream and special needs children chose letters with a slight slant, plain (sans serif) tops and exit strokes on the baseline. These help to clump the letters together into words. The added features were clear, open counters and slightly lengthened ascenders and descenders to accentuate the word shape. The original Sassoon Primary Type was a typeface designed with children and for children to replace the type they read. This was in1986 and computers were only just becoming available in schools, so to start with its main purpose was for educational publishers.

Sassoon Infant developed to meet the demand by publishers for letters that can be used for teaching or representing handwriting. Their alternative characters allow for personal preferences and teachers can now print out consistent pupil material for reading, spelling and handwriting. These clear but elegant letterforms are gaining popularity in different media; in schools, screen fonts for interactive educational software and in television graphics, while the possibilities in advertising have yet to be more fully explored.